Introduction
Do you use utility bars in Salesforce? I think they’re heavily under-appreciated and under-used. Utility bars are widgets that can sit at the bottom of your screen and follow you around Salesforce. When you need them, they pop up with a click.
Because Utility Bars are actually small Lightning Pages, you can put all the standard Lightning Components into them. One example, which I’ll demo here, is a Utility Bar that lets your users email you when something has gone wrong – with the system auto-populating their details.
Implementation Steps
- First, create a new Screen Flow. Give it a name and put some information on the page. For example, I decided to call mine “Report Issue to Provisio” (my current firm) and put the user’s name, role and profile onto the page along with a Long Text Area for them to include some details. Here’s what it looks like:
2. In order to get the current Record ID, you’ll need to install the Get URL component from here. Install it into your org, and drag it onto the Flow. You’ll want to assign its value to a text variable like this:
3. Go ahead and create a new Email Template using New Resource -> Email Template. This is what will be sent out when the Flow is submitted.
4. Finally, add an Email Action to the Flow and for the Body, use the Email Template you just created:
5. That’s it! Your Flow is created now. Pretty simple. Now you can go to Setup -> Apps -> App Manager. Find the app you want and click the “Edit” button. Because this was built in a dev org, I decided to just edit the Sales app:
6. Click the Utility Items (Desktop Only). Then click Add Utility Item and select Flow:
7. Select your Flow, adjust any settings if needed and click Save:
8. You’re done! Let’s see what it looks like to click on:
Step 9. And finally, what it looks like when the email comes in:
